A look back at our first ever tweetchat on CSP Customer Experience

Trying to follow more than 80 people in a Twitter Chat sharing over 500 tweets within an hour, I realized how similar the situation was to that of a communication service provider (CSP) listening to its customers.

The operator has to to understand what different users are asking and how it can be delivered effectively which adds up to a unique challenge : Loads of data, just a few methods to structure the data flood and with almost no chances to automate the response.

Our first Twitter Chat on Customer Experience and the associated solutions for Customer Experience Management (CEM), a joint effort between experts from analyst house Telesperience, Nokia Siemens Networks and Cerillion, translated into an hour of distilled and highly relevant thoughts on various aspects of the issue.

Going by the sheer number of participants and the responses, it’d be more than safe to assume that CEM is a hot topic in today’s market!

Beginning with discussions on “the business effects of improving customer experience” and if “operators today are still too focused on acquisition rather than on retention” , the conversation moved on to a lot of different directions. First of all numbers: “Studies show that a positive Customer Experience can also be used to justify price premiums of as much as 20%” or “In mature markets retention costs can be even 4x the acquisition costs”. Quite a few participants agreed that improving customer experience has “more retention than Ebitda impact”. Moreover, it can play an important role in terms of staying ahead in today’s competitive environment: “customer experience can be used as a key differentiator against OTT providers, offering true multi-channel customer service”. “Maybe we over focus on cheap – is cheap good if it breaks/doesn’t work?”, ”Customers still value good QoS and good coverage very much!”

But it would be too simple, if a CSP would just look for high value customers, because even “high value customers can prove to be unprofitable. That’s why you need intelligence to figure lifetime value” – a shout for a smart approach : “we are drowning under useful data with good biz value we’re not exploiting”. During the course of the discussion “intelligence” was explained with “operators need accurate data – historic as well as real-time. Bad data = bad CX!” and most of participants agreed to the point that “real-time analytics is not the same as real-time response”.

If a proper CEM is not simply the result of pure technology, who else should be responsible for delivering it? “How many telcos have a Chief Experience Officer in their management team?” But for some contributors CEM “isn’t the job of just one team” it’s more like a “whole company initiative”, an approach which has a clear drawback because “when companies say ALL employees are Chief Experience Officers there is no accountability”.

All in all, the thought-provoking discussions clearly indicated that answers in the field of Customer Experience are far from easy. Or, as Keith Dyer from Mobile Europe put it a day later in his editorial: “In short, it got complicated – and I think that mirrors where operators themselves are on this.”